Flying Saucers

History

Ray Palmer launched Flying Saucers from Other Worlds in June 1957, two years after leaving FATE Magazine, the publication he had co-founded with Curtis Fuller in 1948. Palmer had spent the previous decade building a readership that crossed the line between science fiction fandom and genuine anomaly research. He understood, better than anyone in American publishing, how to sell the UFO subject to a mass audience. Flying Saucers was his vehicle for doing exactly that.

The title shortened to simply Flying Saucers after the first year. Palmer published it from his home base in Amherst, Wisconsin, running it alongside Search magazine (formerly Mystic), which covered broader paranormal territory. Where FATE had become a shared venture with Fuller steering the editorial direction, Flying Saucers was Palmer's alone. He wrote much of each issue himself, set the editorial line, and answered reader mail in combative, entertaining columns that kept subscribers engaged for nearly two decades.

The magazine published bimonthly from Amherst, with press runs large enough to reach newsstands across the country. This was unusual for the UFO field. Most UFO publications of the era were mimeographed newsletters with subscriber lists in the hundreds. Palmer's magazines sat next to Popular Mechanics and True Detective at drugstores and bus stations. The Civilian Saucer Intelligence group in New York noted his first issue with a mixture of wariness and respect: Palmer's reputation was "muddy," they wrote, but his reach was undeniable.

The Shaver Mystery and the Contactee Question

Palmer's editorial approach divided the UFO research community. He had made his name in the 1940s by publishing Richard Shaver's stories in Amazing Stories, claims about an underground civilisation of malevolent beings called "deros" that Palmer presented as factual accounts rather than fiction. The Shaver Mystery generated enormous reader response and circulation spikes, but it also earned Palmer permanent scepticism from researchers who saw him as a huckster willing to blur the line between fact and fantasy for sales.

Flying Saucers gave generous space to contactee accounts, stories from people who claimed direct communication with extraterrestrial beings. George Adamski, Howard Menger, and other contactees found a welcoming platform in Palmer's pages. The magazine also published sighting reports, reprinted government documents, and ran investigative pieces on military involvement with UFOs. Palmer covered the 1966 Michigan sightings, the congressional pressure that followed, and the formation of the Condon Committee. But the sighting reports sat alongside Shaver material and contactee narratives, and researchers who wanted clean separation between evidence-based investigation and speculative claims found the mix intolerable.

Palmer never apologised for the editorial blend. He argued that dismissing contactee reports was as intellectually dishonest as dismissing pilot sightings, and that the research community's insistence on respectability was itself a form of censorship. Whether this was principled open-mindedness or commercial calculation is a question that Palmer's critics and defenders still debate.